Page 88 of Resonance

She helped me up, steadying me as my foot slipped. I looked down at the wetness on the floor and realized I’d made the puddle. She patted my back and hugged me close and told me it was okay. And that was when I started to cry.

I didn’t piss myself at Grim’s that night. I was scared, but I was also furious. At whoever was inside the shop. At myself.

I listened to the racket of them rifling through the aisles, the cash register as it crashed on the ground, more glass shattering and bursts of laughter like machine gun fire, quickly cut off by a deeper, masculine voice. Only once did the doorknob jiggle. It was followed by a muffled curse.

“Got a phone,” came from a distance, and my heart sank.

I kept telling myself they’d be on their way once they got what they wanted. The hate inside me spilled outward, radiating through the air, and then it twisted around and tried to swallow me, too.Stupid. So fucking stupid of me.

The doorknob on the Hoard jiggled again.

My breath hitched in my chest.Locked. It’s locked. They can’t get in.I touched the keys in my pocket and wished they were a phone.

Pale lamplight spilled through the tiny, barred casement window behind me, fracturing the darkness in weak spurts. I closed my eyes and began to count.

“Fuck it, let’s go.”

After ten minutes, the shop was quiet. I waited another couple to make sure.

A list formed in my mind, shuffling itself around in importance. Call 1: police. Call 2: Ru. I debated whether Call 3 should be Dan or if Ru should take care of that, as I quietly unlocked the door and turned the handle. There was no steeling myself for the chaos I expected to find. I didn’t even try. I’d heard enough to know better. Dan should fire me, definitely. Everything he’d been working for, everything he’d come out of retirement for in the first place, was ruined.

White light exploded behind my eyes, confusingly brilliant. The pain came a second later, all consuming and so intense that I registered it from a distance at first, my mind flashing a warning before it concentrated into a point on my forehead and slammed outward with such intensity that my stomach lurched with nausea as I stumbled backward.

I landed on my back, breath smacked brutally from my lungs on impact. My fingers moved in desperate automation, scrabbling for purchase against the cool linoleum.

I couldn’t see anything.

I finally grasped something solid and pulled. There was a soft whisper of sound before fire cracked across my ribs, the tiny reserve of air I’d manage to hang on to forced out.

I gasped and then I gasped again. And again. Color bloomed on my eyelids and faded into blobs of brown.

“Jesus fucking Christ, did you kill him?”

“Fuck! Shut up. Right there, grab it, ten seconds. Let’s go.”

There was something familiar about the voice, but recognition danced away from me, eclipsed by darkness that felt warm and steady. I wrapped it around me and let it cocoon me from the outside world. No voices, no sounds of destruction.

No me.

* * *

“O?”Ru’s voice was close. Too close. I nearly jumped from my skin when I rolled over on his couch to find him crouched beside it, face inches from mine.

He read my startled expression and winced. “Sorry.”

“How about a warning tap or something next time?” I mumbled. My tongue felt like it had chunks of cotton stuck to it.

“I did. You were out cold.”

I pulled the blanket higher over my chest. Sunlight crept in from underneath the blinds behind Ru, but I had no idea what time it was.

I frowned. “Stop. You’re practically transmitting your worry all over me.” It was so thick in his expression I could’ve dragged a finger through and spread it around, and it had a gravitational pull that made him look ten years older. I didn’t like that he looked that way because of me. “What time is it?”

“One.”

I bolted upright. “I have a shift.” And then I remembered even as Ru laid his hand on my shoulder and eased me back down.

“Shop’s closed for the next week at least, remember? And Ivy’s gonna meet me there in a little bit to start cleaning up.”